South Korea offers help to contain outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in North Korea

Updated
Tue Feb 25 04:38:29 EST 2014

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South Korea has offered help to contain an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in North Korea.

Landline: ABC TV

South Korea has offered to send vaccine and medical equipment to North Korea to help contain an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, in a further sign of warming cross-border ties.

The offer on Monday came days after North Korea confirmed cases of the highly contagious livestock disease at a pig farm in a suburb of Pyongyang.

It had spread to other areas in the capital and an adjacent county, leading to the culling of thousands of pigs, the North's official KCNA news agency reported.

The agency said at least 3,200 pigs had been infected, some had died but most were slaughtered.

The report expressed concern over the impact of the outbreak, which began on January 8, citing a lack of preventive medicine, diagnostic kits and difficulties in securing disinfectant.

"In our proposal today, we called for talks on an emergency shipment of vaccines and medical equipment to North Korea," a South Korean unification ministry official said.

There had been no response from Pyongyang so far, he said.

There is a precedent for such cooperation, with South Korea having provided experts, medicine and equipment following a 2007 foot-and-mouth outbreak in the North.

In 2011, the entire Korean peninsula was hit by an outbreak that led to the culling of more than three million livestock in the South alone.

Ties between the two Koreas are often fraught but in recent days hundreds of South Koreans have crossed into the North to be reunited with family members not seen since the 1950-53 Korean War.

The reunions were held despite North Korean anger over joint military exercises between South Korea and the United States, which began on Monday. Last year, the exercises triggered weeks of North Korean threats of war.

Foot-and-mouth usually affects cloven-hoofed animals such as sheep, goats, cattle and pigs. It rarely infects humans.